Veritas NetBackup 6.5

This backup and recovery suite offers data protection for data centers, and remote offices with a single console for all backup and recovery operations

Saturday, July 05, 2008

This is an Enterprise backup and recovery solution for large enterprises. NetBackup provides disk based and tape based data protection through a single administration console. It supports full as well as incremental backups with scheduled backups for clients across the network. Administrators can define any number of policies and even control whether users can configure their own backups or not. It has some useful features like snapshots, archiving, deduplication etc. For recovering data it comes with a feature called Bare Metal Restore, in which during backup, the software also captures configuration and current state of the machine. This happens every time a scheduled backup is taken. So whenever the server crashes, it can restore the entire server with its configuration settings. Another interesting feature present in Netbackup is Access Management, in which you can define user groups and functions they can perform.

NetBackup also provides comprehensive reports through its report utility which can be useful in managing NetBackup operations. It comes with as many as 23 reports which includes Tape reports, Disk reports and Vault Reports. NetBackup supports all popular operating systems such as Windows, Linux, Unix etc.

Tests and Results
We tested Veritas NetBackup in a Windows environment for disk based backup with a SAN. We installed the software on a Windows 2003 Server. The installation was easy and so was getting started on it afterwards.

Its administration console at first looked a bit complex, but once we played around with it, it became pretty easy to use. It has a simple Getting Started Wizard through which the initial configuration can be done. The Wizard first detects all external storage devices connected to the server (such as Tape Drives) and helps users connect to a SAN client.

We managed to create a catalog and backup policy within minutes through this wizard. These catalogs are internal databases of NetBackup which contain information required to restore backups. It even asked to catalog the Disaster recovery file related to backup and also emailed it, so that it could easily be retrieved incase of a disaster.

The email contained all information about disaster recovery procedures, catalog backup status information along with the disaster recovery file.

In case Backup destinations need to changed later, it can be easily done through its Storage utility. NetBackup also allows users to configure Storage Lifecycle Policies where it allows users to choose how long the backup images should be retained.

With Veritas Netbakup you can create customized policies for every type backup and schdule them

Every time before starting a backup, NetBackup performs a Bare Metal restore backup of server's configuration

Once a backup has started you can view its details and all related activities from the Activity Monitor window. Other then backup jobs it also shows services, processes and drives involved in the backup process.

Through NetBackup's Activity Monitor Window, you can monitor all Current status of backup jobs, Processes and drives used

NetBackup client too was a breeze to install. The client also came with a MS SQL Server Extension, which easily detected SQL database and its instances present on the server. Through this extension itself it allowed us to backup SQL database with the policy we created earlier. Its client also has a job tracker, from which you can monitor the backups initiated from the client's end. The best part about NetBackup client is that you do not need to install separate database agents and users on client end can also initiate backups as well as restores. With the same NetBackup client you can backup/restore desktops also.

NetBackup comes with an MS SQL Server extension, through which you can easily backup and restore the database

We then tested the server with full disk backup of another server running Windows 2003 with 1GB RAM and Intel Xeon processor, having 30 GB of data present over a 100 Mbps LAN, It took 1 hour and 16 seconds to backup the entire data. After the backup had finished, when we checked the location where data was getting backed up, we found the solution had created three .img files, out of which one was a 30 GB file, which we presume contained all backed up data and also present there were a bunch of .info files.

After that we deleted a few files from the master server and tried restoring it. Interestingly if you want to restore a few files, it can only be done through the NetBackup client. This cannot be done from NetBackup's Administration Console. Veritas NetBackup client managed to restore the files perfectly without much trouble.

Bottomline: Overall, if you are looking for a continuous data protection solution, this one is a good choice. About the price Symantec told us it doesn't have a fixed price and it largely depends upon the number of agents that the customer is going to deploy.

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